Sunday, April 25, 2010

Saturday, April 24th, 2010, I brewed my first solo all grain batch of beer. I am eager to see how it turns out, since I failed on so many levels.

- Killed my thermometer, and didn't know the exact temp of sparge water.- Apparently when I took the pre-boil specific gravity reading, the first running and the second running weren't mixed properly, so it showed 1.060, freaking me out.- Added approx 3 quarts of water, to the boil correcting the then feared "to high of efficency."- At end of boil, wort was at 1.050, way under what I wanted.- Took longer to chill than I wanted.- Forgot to aerate wort.- When pitching yeast, found that the Activator smack pack wasn't "smacked." Before brewing, I tried for 20 minutes to break the tiny inner pouch, thought that I did. However, at pitching time the pack was swelled tight.

The actual pre-boil SG was: 1.045, which translates to a mash efficiency of 80%. (Pretty Good!) Had I left it alone and not diluted the wort, it would have been fine, with a OG of 1.056, or 5.6% ABV. Instead with the 0.75 Gal of water added, I'll get 4.9% ABV, which is what I would have had with a 70% mash efficiency.